By: Antaeus Feldspar

@82

To me it still seems as if the swine flu is so rare in comparison to the seasonal flu that it’s not even worth the worry.

The key word in that sentence, though, is “seems”.

Imagine a chessboard. Imagine putting one grain of wheat on the first square of a chessboard, two grains on the second, four grains on the third, and so on, doubling each time.

It doesn’t “seem” like it would add up to much. But in fact if you put all the arable land on Earth into wheat production the total harvest for 80 years would just about equal it.

The wheat-and-chessboard problem is a common illustration of the power of exponential growth, and infectious diseases, unless checked, grow exponentially, because with each person they infect they increase the number of people spreading the disease.

Overall there’s so much hype about these sort of things and it’s become an issue of the Media who Cried SARS.

The problem is that the most successful result of dealing with a disease that could cause an epidemic is preventing it from causing an epidemic, and yet if they achieve that highest success it destroys the evidence that they did anything of significance.

I think you might want to look up Ben Goldacre’s account of how the media contacted him on the swine flu issue. Goldacre is a respected British science writer, and he says that in a short space of time two media outlets contacted him asking him for a quote about how the media had overhyped swine flu.

Read that carefully.

They didn’t say “You are a person respected for your scientific judgment; do you think the media overstated the dangers of the swine flu?” They simply assumed that because they wanted a “the media overhyped the danger” angle, that he would provide them such a quote.

I think you have to ask yourself, how much of your belief that the media overhypes the danger of infectious diseases is itself a media creation?